Definitely agree the Chinese infrastructure model is better than what the US has been doing. The US built a psuedo empire with the military security assistance and access to US markets. China is now doing it with infrastructure and debt – akin to the British Empire
I somewhat disagree about the debt. Yes, the Chinese can build faster using their own labor but at the expense that the benefit doesn’t go to workers in those countries. Also, we don’t know how much corruption and kickbacks there are as well as funds going to offshore tax havens vs how much actually goes to the country. It’s a problem for western development too, but inherently, the Chinese are more opaque and there’s definitely more corruption – just hard to quantify.
Also, the infrastructure is very expensive relative to the GDP of those countries and will not be economically sustainable – essentially, the Chinese will economically own those countries and have strong political influence.
The issue I have is that, at the moment, China’s expansion is benign (except for the South China Sea). However, as with any expanding empire that feels relatively increasing strength, they will eventually challenge the US geo-politically. The question is when this happens, will China block other countries’s access (economic, trade, etc) to South and East Asia. It’s not entirely unfeasible that at some point in the future, China has military ports in Africa, Sri Lanka, South East Asia, etc), and they can economically strangle Japan for whatever reason or force Taiwan to accept unification (and the US would have little ability to block this at the detriment to US global influence.)
At the same time, I feel like China is making similar mistakes to the Europeans for empire expansion in the 19th century. There will be a backlash by the larger population that doesn’t feel (or perceived) like they are getting economic benefits or resent Chinese control.
The US has made lots of mistakes in the post WW-II era, but has not generally pursued such a policy (there are exceptions like Iran, NK). The best situation we can hope is that the US learns the good aspects of Chinese geopolitics (economic, non-intervention), and the Chinese learn the good parts of the US (anti-corruption, sustainable development).
Otherwise, we are headed for another 50+ year cold war.
